for people who care about the West

Trouble over the Badlands

Oglala Lakota Sioux fight for
control of part of Badlands National Park

BADLANDS,
SOUTH DAKOTA — Ernie Two Bulls, a jovial Lakota man with a
few wrinkles around his eyes, drops a ragged pair of football
cleats on the hood of his black pickup. “These are the only
shoes I hike in around here,” he says. “The spikes keep
you on the ground.”

The pickup is parked under the
flag of the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe, which flaps in the wind atop
a skinned wooden pole. The flags are banners of defiance: They
stand at the center of a protest camp, a few tepees, scattered
tents and an old trailer perched on a vast grassy plateau.

Behind Two Bulls, the edge of the mesa crumbles off into a crimson
valley. Hundreds of feet below, the land stretches out across sharp
pink and lavender ridges until the prairie grasses touch the sky.
This is called the Badlands for a good reason: The rugged valleys
and steep clay channels make most areas virtually inaccessible,
even to Two Bulls in his spiked shoes.

This land is
supposed to be open to everyone. Badlands National Monument,
established in 1939, became a national park in 1978. The size of
the original monument was nearly doubled in 1976, when the South
Unit was added to it, largely from reservation land once used as an
Air Force bombing range.

Almost half of the
350-square-mile park now lies within the Pine Ridge Reservation,
and since 1976, the Park Service has shared management of it with
the Oglala Sioux. In return for allowing the public on tribal
lands, the tribe receives half the entrance fees, about $800,000 in
2001. The money goes to the Oglala Sioux Park Association and to
tribal bison and range-management programs; it also funds
reservation infrastructure and government.

That
partnership held strong for more than 25 years, but in the last few
years, the agreement has started to break apart. In its place is
the growing resentment that fuels Two Bulls’
encampment.

Conflict
erupts

In the 1970s, the Pine Ridge Reservation, which
sits in the poorest county in the nation and has an unemployment
rate of 80 percent, was a hotbed of activism. Clashes between the
tribe and the federal government resulted in the Indian occupation
of the historic massacre site at Wounded Knee and a deadly
shoot-out between the FBI and tribal members.

In the
spring of 2002, the dispute between the Park Service and the tribe
led to a new occupation. Ernie Two Bulls and about 30 members of
the Oglala Sioux Tribe set up camp in the southern part of the
park, enraged by the agency’s decision to allow off-road
vehicles into an area called Stronghold Table, where they
reportedly rolled over gravesites and ripped up historic tepee
rings. The area is sacred to the tribe because it sheltered
survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre in the winter of 1890, when
U.S. soldiers slaughtered more than 150 American Indians, many of
them women and children.

Shortly after protesters
occupied the camp, Tribal President John Yellow Bird Steel stepped
into the fray, ordering that roads leading into the portion of the
park within the reservation be chained shut. But Park Service
employees took bolt cutters to the chains, saying the tribe had no
authority to block access to the park.

Adding fuel to the
fire, the National Park Service then announced plans for a fossil
dig on tribal land within the park. The tribal administration is
angry it wasn’t involved in the planning process, and some
fear the excavation could disturb sacred sites.

“This is our graveyard here, this is where our people are
buried, and we need to protect this,” says Tony Two Bulls,
Ernie’s brother.

Protesters maintain that the
entire South Unit of the Badlands is sacred land, and they want
sole control of the area. Says C.J. Bradford, “What we have
here is a concern of the heart, and I want the lands back that my
ancestors walked before me.”

Struggling
toward compromise

But some in the Park Service and
within the tribe accuse protesters of poaching fossils from the
park and selling them; that’s why, they say, certain tribal
families want full control of the land. Richard Sherman, who is
with the Oglala Sioux Parks and Recreation Authority Board of
Directors, admits that some of the protesters have illegally taken
fossils, but he still believes this section of the Badlands should
be returned to the Lakota people.

Park Superintendent
Bill Supernaugh disagrees. He says his agency has a duty to manage
the park for all visitors and the public, not just the tribe. He
adds that the park does its utmost to protect Lakota cultural and
spiritual sites, but must also protect fossil remains from
poachers. A series of talks among the tribal administration, the
protesters and the Park Service began this spring, but compromise
is still a long way off. “We need to get together at the
table and really hash things over and work it out to the benefit of
both parties,” says Sherman. “The farther we get from
spirit of the original (1976) agreement, the greater room there is
for misinterpretation on both sides.”

The Park
Service has said it is willing to give the tribe greater control
over the South Unit of the Badlands, but the tribe insists it wants
total jurisdiction over the land. But national park lands cannot
change hands without congressional action. And even though the
“Indian vote” is much coveted by South Dakota’s
congressional delegation, including Democratic Senators Tim Johnson
and Tom Daschle, the Lakota have few friends in Congress, and none
of them have come out in support of returning these lands.

Meanwhile, the protesters, who have been here for over a
year, are determined to stay until the land is returned to the
tribe. Ernie Two Bulls leans against the hood of his pickup:
“We’re here to stay, we’re going to get this land
back, and that’s all there is to it.”

The author writes from Rapid City, South Dakota, and
works for South Dakota Public Radio.